The Salafi Awakening

In the wake of Egypt’s revolution and subsequent elections, Westerners have focused on the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Egyptian Salafis, more fundamentalist than the Brotherhood, bear watching as well.

SINCE EGYPTIAN president Hosni Mubarak was pushed aside on February 11, 2011, many U.S. academics and policy makers have issued warnings, reassurances and speculations on the question of how relations with Egypt will be affected by the rise of its largest opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. True to expectations, the Brotherhood did well in the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, with its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) collecting almost half of the seats in the new People’s Assembly. The biggest election surprise, however, was that its greatest rival was not one of Egypt’s many secular parties, all of which did poorly, but rather another set of Islamists—the Salafi Islamist bloc won almost a quarter of the seats.